Design Researcher + Technologist
Hi, I'm a designer and researcher who uses code, electronics, and 3D fabrication to confront the complexity of the systems we encounter every day — translating public data, biomaterials, and open-access structures into objects, instruments, and interfaces.
sophiacollender@icloud.com → deeper aboutWhat I'm Building
An online archive documenting how unconventional fine art materials are made from scratch — reused materials, biomaterials, earth pigments.
Read case study →Designing an instrument with zero learning curve — pressure-based interaction across the whole surface, refined through hands-on usability testing. NYU Prototyping Fund ×2.
Read case study →An online literary magazine built with a custom web experience for every piece it publishes.
Read case study →A packaging system designed so the material communicates its own end-of-life — grown from seaweed, zero synthetic inputs, closed-loop by design.
Read case study →Experiments
A stylized visualization of real cave scans filling with simulated rainwater.
Read case study →An interactive guide for identifying and caring for plants, built as a playful, exploratory reference tool.
Read case study →A scroll-driven listening piece tracing how organum — polyphonic music born from a second voice added to Gregorian plainchant — transformed European church music.
Read case study →A meditative game — trace a slow circle around drifting shapes to gather them in. Nothing to lose here.
Read case study →An interactive playground for watching how a language model actually picks its next word — one probability at a time.
Read case study →A scroll-driven explainer on the chemistry of corrosion, paired with a real 3D-scanned rusted object you can drag and rotate.
Read case study →A typing experience where color shifts represent your velocity, answering short prompts against the clock.
Read case study →Exhibitions
The New York Transit Museum — an interactive installation using conductive boards to sonify live transit data.
Read case study →Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media — a cartography-focused installation mapping transportation systems.
Read case study →Conductive-board cartography installation, independent venue presentation.
Read case study →Bobst Library — an installation involving smashed cement elements, part of The Public's Domain.
Read case study →The New York Horological Society — a time-based installation built around a pill-clock mechanism.
Read case study →Material Investigations
An unconventional input surface — cinder block and conductive slime — designed to test how much unpredictability an interface can carry before users stop trusting it.
Read case study →A deliberately imprecise timepiece exploring what "good enough" information looks like, and how users build trust in an ambiguous interface over time.
Read case study →Documenting the growth of Physarum polycephalum over time through a microscopic camera and sped-up footage.
Read case study →Ongoing research into designing reliable feedback around organic, living components — the foundation behind Slimesynthzer and Date Clock.
Read case study →The rapid prototype-test-iterate practice behind every enclosure and mechanism in this portfolio, built in Fusion 360 and 3D printed at every stage.
Read case study →Writing
2025, Interledger Summit — research on payment interoperability among global mass transit systems.
Read the article →Interledger Foundation — a cohort initiative examining financial inclusion, open payments, and digital governance.
Read the article →Adjacent, Issue 12 — an essay on slime mold, artificial intelligence, and non-human spatial intelligence.
Read the article →This is a Lorenz attractor — a simple set of equations whose path never repeats, but never looks random either. It's a small model for complexity: a few simple rules, endlessly reshaped.